La Théorie platonicienne de la Doxa by Yvon Lafrance (review)

HUMANITIES 503 supported, and that we may look forward to regularly revised editions of one of the most remarkable and valuable scholarly books published in Canada. (CARL MOREY) Yvon Lafrance. La Theorie platonicienne de Ia Doxa Les Belles Lettres I Bellarmin. 475 As Yvon Lafrance says in his introduction (p 11), 'il n'existe aucune etude en fran~ais sur la theorie platonicienne de la doxa.' In this he is right, and his own lengthy book is a systematicattempt to change matters. Four basic methodological commitmentsunderlie it: 1/supposed 'contradictions' can be dealt with if we follow Schleiermacher in assuming a coherent development in Plato's thought; 2/ particular texts of Plato must be read 'in the context of a given period of the evolution of Plato's thought' (p 16); 3/ due account must always be taken of the relevant scholarly literature; 4 / only the most 'developed: and consequently the most 'significant,' accounts of doxa (in its philosophical rather than its literary usage) need be analysed in detail (p 17). Commitments 1 and 2 pit Lafrance against what one might call the 'German school' of writers on Platonic doxa, Ihm (1877), Sprute (1962), and Tielsch (1970). Commitment 3 is a majority-view, no doubt, but Lafrance is a remarkable practitioner of the art. Few Frenchlanguage Platonists have covered the relevant literature, especially the English- and German-language literature, with such care, understanding, and willingness to examine a different point of view. One must admire in particular Lafrance's quite extraordinary understanding of what might roughly be called the 'analytic' school of Platonists; one wonders ruefully, given the current and long-standing 'great divide' between AngloAmerican and continental forms of philosophizing, how many of the former will read him as dispassionately as he himself has read them, or for that matter how gracefully 'Ie platonisant continental' will receive the mass of information about analytic interpretations of Plato that this book brings forcefully to his attention? The range of Lafrance's studies leads him, not surprisingly, to a perception of Platonic epistemology which sometimes blends, and sometimes builds upon, a number of continental and analytic interpretations. The Theory of Forms, for example, he follows traditional continental (and pre-war Anglo-American) philosophers in taking to be integral to Plato's thought, and never actually abandoned, though it was, in the Sophist, significantly transformed. Against this tradition, however, Lafrance follows the 'analysts' in finding no reference to a doctrine of forms in the Theaetetus. His own view (following Hicken) is that the theory is 'methodologically ignored' (p 303) in the Theaetetus, as being inappropriate to deal with the specific problem of false judgment that the dialogue is at pains to examine. His reason for this is that the 'model' of knowledge 504 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 that postulates Forms is an 'ontological' one, while the model of knowledge that operates in the Theaetetus is more accurately describable as propositional (p 210). The view is an interesting one, and for Lafrance partand parcel of a general conviction of the basic unity of Plato's thought - a view he shares with the traditionalists, both continental and Anglo-American - but it left this reader unconvinced. The Sophist, after all, on Lafrance's own admission, strongly espouses the Theory of Forms, albeit in a highly modified version, and it is by using preCisely such a theory that Plato can solve the problem of false judgment that had posed such difficulties in the Theaetetus. In his interpretation of the Meno Lafrance again backs the analytic tradition (against, inter alios, !hm and Robin) in rejecting any reference to Forms in the famous phrase aitias /ogismoi, and an understanding of 'recollection' as both empirical and conceptual bases itself on a combination of the views of Ross and Gulley. In this Lafrance is surely on the side of the angels. But a book that deals in such detail with Plato's epistemology, and not least with the role in it of the Theory of Forms, cannot, as this one does, almost completely bypass the Timaeus. This is a startling omission, since on either interpretation of its dating, 'middle' or 'late: Lafrance's understanding of Plato's epistemological 'development' seems almost...